This work aims to promote the concept of reducing the incidence of election irregularities and requiring less intervention by the court or similar disputes resolution mechanisms. The essence of this new approach is to place much greater emphasis on drastically reducing errors through noncompliance with electoral laws and particularly rules, regulations, and directives, which result in election irregularities. This approach may require greater clarity in drafting election rules and regulations as well as more intense monitoring and warning systems developed by EMBs to ensure a high degree of accuracy in the preparation and polling processes. This concept proceeds on the basis that, in general, election stakeholders wish to see the genuine results of the democratic process without diversions to the court or similar assistance being brought into action.
"Butterfly ballots, balky machines, absentee ballot scandals, felons voting, Supreme Court intervention - all these made headlines during the infamous 2000 Florida recount. Could it happen again in this year's presidential election? The answer is yes, because not much has changed to improve our election systems, while both major parties are poised on a hair trigger to file lawsuits and challenge any close statewide vote. The issues may boil down to whether the margin of victory in any state exceeds the "margin of litigation."" "John Fund offers a guided tour of our error-prone election systems, which nearly half of Americans say they don't trust. When some states have systems so flawed that you can't tell where incompetence ends and possible fraud begins, it isn't surprising that scandals have ranged from rural Texas to big cities such as Milwaukee and St. Louis. Fund dissects some anomalies of Florida 2000 and analyzes the bitterly protracted election for governor of Washington State in 2004. He spotlights the perils of "provisional ballots," the flaws of the "Motor Voter" law that has allowed people to get absentee ballots for phantom voters, and the shady registration drives of the radical group ACORN. Meanwhile, the simple safeguard of a photo ID requirement meets vigorous opposition on the specious claim that it would disenfranchise poor and minority voters." "Stealing Elections presents a chilling portrait of electoral vulnerability, as a combination of bureaucratic bungling and ballot rigging put our democracy at risk."--BOOK JACKET.
- Voter fraud is the "intentional corruption of the electoral process by the voter." This definition covers knowingly and willingly giving false information to establish voter eligibility, and knowingly and willingly voting illegally or participating in a conspiracy to encourage illegal voting by others. All other forms of corruption of the electoral process and corruption committed by elected or election officials, candidates, party organizations, advocacy groups or campaign workers fall under the wider definition of election fraud. - Voter fraud is extremely rare. At the federal level, records show that only 24 people were convicted of or pleaded guilty to illegal voting between 2002 and 2005, an average of eight people a year. The available state-level evidence of voter fraud, culled from interviews, reviews of newspaper coverage and court proceedings, while not definitive, is also negligible. - The lack of evidence of voter fraud is not because of a failure to codify it. It is not as if the states have failed to detail the ways voters could corrupt elections. There are hundreds of examples drawn from state election codes and constitutions that illustrate the precision with which the states have criminalized voter and election fraud. If we use the same standards for judging voter fraud crime rates as we do for other crimes, we must conclude that the lack of evidence of arrests, indictments or convictions for any of the practices defined as voter fraud means very little fraud is being committed. - Most voter fraud allegations turn out to be something other than fraud. A review of news stories over a recent two year period found that reports of voter fraud were most often limited to local races and individual acts and fell into three categories: unsubstantiated or false claims by the loser of a close race, mischief and administrative or voter error. - The more complex are the rules regulating voter registration and voting, the more likely voter mistakes, clerical errors, and the like will be wrongly identified as "fraud." Voters play a limited role in the electoral process. Where they interact with the process they confront an array of rules that can trip them up. In addition, one consequence of expanding voting opportunities, i.e. permissive absentee voting systems, is a corresponding increase in opportunities for casting unintentionally illegal ballots if administrative tracking and auditing systems are flawed. - There is a long history in America of elites using voter fraud allegations to restrict and shape the electorate. In the late nineteenth century when newly freed black Americans were swept into electoral politics, and where blacks were the majority of the electorate, it was the Democrats who were threatened by a loss of power, and it was the Democratic party that erected new rules said to be necessary to respond to alleged fraud by black voters. Today, the success of voter registration drives among minorities and low income people in recent years threatens to expand the base of the Democratic party and tip the balance of power away from the Republicans. Consequently, the use of baseless voter fraud allegations for partisan advantage has become the exclusive domain of Republican party activists
The Voter Fraud Manual is the ultimate guide to voter fraud and election integrity. All manner of fraud is examined, from how it works to how to stop it, using proven, real life examples. Inside, you will learn about: False Identity voting Duplicate voting Ballot harvesting Stuffing the ballot box Using vulnerable adults for fraud Bribery, intimidation and coercion Voting by ineligible felons and non-citizens Corruption and conspiracies How Voter Fraud brought us Obamacare How to detect and prevent election fraud 21st Century Voter ID More Author Dan McGrath is a noted expert with over fourteen years in the field of voter fraud research and election integrity advocacy. Dan has extensive experience working in and around politics and government. He has served as executive director, president and communications director for non-profit organizations, a campaign manager for candidates, chairman of a ballot committee and a registered lobbyist. He has also launched several successful lawsuits against government entities and won cases in both the Minnesota and United States Supreme Courts. Dan's voter fraud research and election integrity advocacy has been featured in numerous national and local television and radio programs and newspapers.
Waiting for the Cemetery Vote begins with an overview chapter of Arkansas election fraud since the nineteenth century and then moves on to more specific examples of fraudulent activities over a dozen or so years that coincide with the onset of the modern progressive era in Arkansas. Author Tom Glaze, who was a trial lawyer battling election fraud during this time, is the ideal chronicler for this topic, bringing a memoirist's intimate insight together with a wealth of historical knowledge. Glaze describes the manipulation of absentee ballots and poll-tax receipts; votes cast by the dead, children, and animals; forgeries of ballots from nursing homes; and threats to body or livelihood made to anyone who would dare question these activities or monitor elections. Deceptive practices used to control election results were disturbingly brazen in the gubernatorial elections in the 1960s and were especially egregious in Conway and Searcy Counties in the 1970s and in special elections for the state senate in Faulkner, Conway, and Van Buren Counties. A clean-election movement began in the early 1970s, led not by party or political leaders but by individual citizens. These vigilant and courageous Arkansans undertook to do what their public institutions persistently failed to: insure that elections for public office were honest and that the will of the people was scrupulously obliged. Prominent and colorful among these groups was a small band of women in Conway County who dubbed themselves the "Snoop Sisters" and took on the long-established corrupt machine of Sheriff Marlin Hawkins. Written with longtime Arkansas political writer Ernie Dumas and illustrated with cartoons from the inimitable George Fisher, Waiting for the Cemetery Vote will be an entertaining and informative read for any Arkansas history and politics buffs.
Accusations of voter fraud and voter suppression have been widespread in the 21st century, but the facts are often obscured. How much of a problem is voter fraud and what should be done to combat it? Will proposed measures be helpful or harmful to most voters? Informative text and engaging fact boxes help readers explore voting rights issues. They'll gain a better understanding of the facts surrounding this politically charged topic. A list of ways young people can become more involved in voting rights activism is included to help them become ideal citizens.
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book of 2015 A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2015 A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015 A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2015 An NPR Best Book of 2015 Countless books have been written about the civil rights movement, but far less attention has been paid to what happened after the dramatic passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 and the turbulent forces it unleashed. Give Us the Ballot tells this story for the first time. In this groundbreaking narrative history, Ari Berman charts both the transformation of American democracy under the VRA and the counterrevolution that has sought to limit voting rights, from 1965 to the present day. The act enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. And yet, fifty years later, we are still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power, with lawmakers devising new strategies to keep minorities out of the voting booth and with the Supreme Court declaring a key part of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. Berman brings the struggle over voting rights to life through meticulous archival research, in-depth interviews with major figures in the debate, and incisive on-the-ground reporting. In vivid prose, he takes the reader from the demonstrations of the civil rights era to the halls of Congress to the chambers of the Supreme Court. At this important moment in history, Give Us the Ballot provides new insight into one of the most vital political and civil rights issues of our time.
The 2000 presidential election meltdown and the more recent controversy about computer voting machines did not come out of the blue. Steal This Vote tells the fraught but very colorful history of electoral malfeasance in the United States. It is a tale of votes bought, stolen, suppressed, lost, cast more than once, assigned to dead people and pets, miscounted, thrown into rivers, and litigated all the way to the Supreme Court. (No wonder America has the lowest voter participation rate of any Western democracy!) Andrew Gumbel—whose work on the new electronic voting fraud has been praised by Gore Vidal and Paul Krugman, and has won a Project Censored Award—shows that, for all the idealism about American democracy, free and fair elections have been the exception, not the rule. In fact, Gumbel suggests that Tammany Hall, shrouded as it is in moral odium, might have been a fairer system than we have today, because ostensibly positive developments like the secret ballot have been used to squash voting rights ever since.
In this major work of popular history and scholarship, acclaimed historian and biographer Roy Morris, Jr., tells the extraordinary story of how, in America's centennial year, the presidency was stolen, the Civil War was almost reignited, and black Americans were consigned to nearly ninety years of legalized segregation in the South. The bitter 1876 contest between Ohio Republican governor Rutherford B. Hayes and New York Democratic governor Samuel J. Tilden is the most sensational, ethically sordid, and legally questionable presidential election in American history. The first since Lincoln's in 1860 in which the Democrats had a real chance of recapturing the White House, the election was in some ways the last battle of the Civil War, as the two parties fought to preserve or overturn what had been decided by armies just eleven years earlier. Riding a wave of popular revulsion at the numerous scandals of the Grant administration and a sluggish economy, Tilden received some 260,000 more votes than his opponent. But contested returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina ultimately led to Hayes's being declared the winner by a specially created, Republican-dominated Electoral Commission after four tense months of political intrigue and threats of violence. President Grant took the threats seriously: he ordered armed federal troops into the streets of Washington to keep the peace. Morris brings to life all the colorful personalities and high drama of this most remarkable -- and largely forgotten -- election. He presents vivid portraits of the bachelor lawyer Tilden, a wealthy New York sophisticate whose passion for clean government propelled him to the very brink of the presidency, and of Hayes, a family man whose midwestern simplicity masked a cunning political mind. We travel to Philadelphia, where the Centennial Exhibition celebrated America's industrial might and democratic ideals, and to the nation's heartland, where Republicans waged a cynical but effective "bloody shirt" campaign to tar the Demo-crats, once again, as the party of disunion and rebellion. Morris dramatically recreates the suspenseful events of election night, when both candidates went to bed believing Tilden had won, and a one-legged former Union army general, "Devil Dan" Sickles, stumped into Republican headquarters and hastily improvised a devious plan to subvert the election in the three disputed southern states. We watch Hayes outmaneuver the curiously passive Tilden and his supporters in the days following the election, and witness the late-night backroom maneuvering of party leaders in the nation's capital, where democracy itself was ultimately subverted and the will of the people thwarted. Fraud of the Century presents compelling evidence that fraud by Republican vote-counters in the three southern states, and especially in Louisiana, robbed Tilden of the presidency. It is at once a masterful example of political reporting and an absorbing read.
